


Lost Letters

by CrossedBeams



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, MSR, if MS2 and Babylon never happened, revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-06 19:26:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 14,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8765932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrossedBeams/pseuds/CrossedBeams
Summary: Set post revival but imagining it ended after Home Again, no apocalypse and Mulder and Scully recovering from Maggie Scully’s death. Festive misery for y’all with an epistolary twist as Mulder tries to hold it all together.





	1. Chapter 1

 

The foam tiles above his desk are so full of holes that sometimes his pencils pass straight through and lodge in the crawl space above. It doesn’t stop him throwing them, not even when the most battered tile cracks and synthetic dust rains down on his head. The hollow rattle and crumbling structure match his mood perfectly. As Mulder picks the grey specks out of his hair in the tiny basement bathroom he wonders at the gathering crowd of grey hairs that are not so easily removed. He is getting old. Ossifying under neon lights, whiling away minutes with tossed pencils as he waits for Scully to arrive. **  
**

It is Wednesday. He’s been waiting since Monday. Her doorman assures him she is alive, coming and going in her hospital clothes, eyes tired and head bowed. Mulder can picture it. He’s seen her that way before, heavy with grief and pushing forward as if somehow she can outpace her pain. The last time it had been his fault. He’d watched her from somewhere outside his body, watched her plead with him, watched her cry for him and then sat in the silence as she bowed to her sadness, folded in on herself and then disappeared.

The day she left, Mulder tried to disappear too. He poured himself so far into a bottle of scotch that he couldn’t see the empty space Scully had filled and he had planned to stay there. He might have been successful without Maggie Scully’s intervention.

Mulder didn’t remember her first few visits; he’d simply woken up clean and in bed instead of filthy and on the floor somewhere. But as time passed his mind coughed back to life and he began to ponder the X-File of his own survival until one night, when she crept in with soup and a sad smile, she found him sober and sat on the couch waiting for her. That was the first night Mulder cried in front of Maggie Scully but it wasn’t the last. She smelled a little like her daughter. She had the same hands, firm but kind. And she still loved him.

Maggie Scully had saved him.

She had saved them both.

Short conversations in the early days of the X-Files re-assignment had left much to his imagination but given enough detail to know that Maggie had been a regular visitor to Scully’s new apartment. That she had persisted through endless silent meals, bitter quarrels and attempts to push her away until Scully was at least half functional. Because that’s all they were apart. Half functional. It had never been so glaringly obvious as it was when they went back into the field. Alone they were targets, they failed and fell and almost got killed. Together though, they were a forced to be reckoned with and for a time, that professional togetherness had been enough. 

They had old habits to fall back on, not talking about the hard stuff being the key one, and somehow they muddled through the endless reminders of their shared loss and learned to laugh together again. And after the laughter had come the sex. Perhaps it wasn’t the riotous release of their early relationship but it was good, no jackalope head or unfamiliar bedroom could distract from the fact that inside Scully, Mulder felt like a whole person. They’d gone together to dinner at Maggie’s after that ridiculous case. They had shared a ride, Scully had held his hand under the table and Maggie had pretended not to notice though her smile and wetness in her eyes said otherwise. When they’d said goodbye she’d hugged him for a little too long, hugged Scully hard enough to earn a puberty-perfected eye roll and followed them out to the car, waving them off until she vanished into the darkness. 

That night was the first that Scully spent back at their house, the first time she drank her morning coffee from the mug  that was hers, from the matching set her mother had given them when they finally settled down all those years before. They’d laughed about the transparency of Maggie’s motives in bed, happy that she was happy, grateful for her support but wrapped up in each other, in the old/new tangle of limbs and emotions that filled their bedroom. Neither of them had known that was the last time they would see her.

If they had, they never would have left.

Scully wore her mother’s loss like a heavy robe. There were moments where she moved with determination, where her energy outweighed her sorrow but as the days passed and exhaustion crept in she began to disappear beneath it, folding it around her and drawing it between them. Mulder grieved in his own way, hoping for closeness but not pressing for it and trying not to break down when little by little, the walls that Maggie had torn down between him and her daughter inched back up. Scully stopped seeking out his touch, stopped meeting his eye across the room, stopped smiling that half smile that had taken his heart hostage the first year she’d invaded his office. Then she stopped talking to him, swallowing all but the essential words with the tears she had still not cried.

Mulder hadn’t argued when she told him her old job had asked her to help out part time when a colleague was taken ill. Scully had seemed positive about it, talking about balancing old and new with a fervour she hadn’t had in weeks. Skinner had signed off the job share, respectful of Scully’s process, wary of her sadness and at first it had seemed to be enough to stop her from disappearing any further. Work gave her a purpose she said; she did two days at the hospital and three at the FBI and it seemed to be working. Until it wasn’t.

Her phone started ringing to voicemail in her empty apartment, hours after she should have been home. Three days at the bureau turned into two, eight hours of flat conversation and long silence as the circles around Scully’s eyes grew deeper. Her voice got quieter words crackling past the lump in her throat that stopped her eating, stripped the flesh from her bones faster than even the cancer had. Desperate, Mulder had spent long hours waiting in her lobby, hoping to speak to her away from the FBI, to somehow get through to her only to be endlessly, gently pushed away as she numbly forged her path alone. He stopped waiting for her the day he ran out for coffee and found her dozing in her car a block away, just in sight of the spot where he had been holding vigil, waiting for him to leave before she went home. He bribed her doorman to text him as she came and went, loving her desperately from afar but unable to pierce the fog of her misery.

Maggie’s death had cost him two Scully women. The one who had loved him more than his own mother was gone forever and the one who had just stepped back within his reach and was now slipping through his fingers faster than the dirt he had sprinkled on her mother’s coffin.

For a split second Mulder wondered about finding a bar. Finding a bottle of something bitter and biting to bring back some sort of fight and then confronting Scully, shouting that it would break Maggie’s heart to see her like this, that his heart was breaking too, over her loss, their loss, and out of the fear of losing her again. But even as he thinks it it he can hear Maggie’s voice, soft and sensible, telling him that an explosion like that would only burn them both where they are already bruised, that Dana will let him in when she is ready. Mulder only hopes that Scully will be ready before she disappears completely into the blackness of her depression.

Mulder walks back to the office half holding his breath, Maybe she will be there when he opens the door. She isn’t. The dust motes are the only thing moving in the office and in a fit of desperation Mulder slams open a random drawer and pulls out a case file. It’s something from his recovery period, the months where he was dried out enough to keep tabs on interesting stories but not really fit to investigate anything.

Retreating to his desk he flips open the manila folder and pulls out the top sheet.

A letter dated 5th December 2014.

> _Dear Mr Fox Mulder,_
> 
> _I realise this is an unconventional request and you will probably think I’m insane but it’s a risk I have to take. I’m known by many names, all across the world but you probably know me best as Santa Claus. Laugh now. I’m sure you want to. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in me or not, all that matters is that you help me._
> 
> _It’s my job, as I’m sure you know, to grant Christmas wishes to those who are deserving, and I’ve never failed before. But this year there is one wish I can’t quite work out, one soul who deserves happiness but who I can’t seem to touch. I want you to help me, to find out how I can help this person, perform a Christmas miracle if you will._
> 
> _If you’ve made it this far through the letter then we’re doing pretty well, but I won’t press my luck. Think about it Fox (I know you prefer Mulder but you were Fox when I visited you regularly and old habits die hard) and I’ll write again tomorrow._
> 
> _I have faith that you will make the right choice._
> 
> _Best wishes and kind regards,_
> 
> _S.C._

Mulder reads the letter three times, puzzled that he doesn’t remember this particularly zany brand of weird from first receiving it before screwing the letter up and tossing it in the bin. With a deep sigh he pulls his coat on and locks up the office, planning to make a pit-stop with Scully’s doorman and get an early night.

It was going to take more than a note from Santa Claus to save his Christmas.


	2. Thanksgiving

_One Week Later.  
_

Working Thanksgiving was not new territory for Mulder. Pre-Scully it had been survival instinct, the easiest way to avoid the long shadow of his mother’s table and expectations. In the X-Files years working was the best way to ensure Scully, the only thing for which he was consistently thankful, would be at his side. He is completely sure that by the third year she’d seen through his rambling diatribes on ghostly pilgrims or headless turkey manifestations but she’d played along, allowing him to intrude on the edges of her holidays until Maggie had extended him a formal invitation to the Scully family celebration.

Mostly it had been hellish, Bill’s passive-aggressive posturing curdling the goodwill but there were times it had been just what Mulder imagined family occasions were supposed to be like. There was good food, too much wine, giving spirit and snug afternoons of bad TV and sitting slightly too close in front of a fire. On the run he’d tried once to recreate it for Scully; renting a log cabin with a fireplace and buying the makings of a meal, but the absence of her mother and their son had left them both devoid of anything but melancholy.

 There had been too few chances to rediscover that togetherness between Mulder’s pardon and Scully leaving; Maggie’s attempts to brush aside the years of her daughter’s life that their work had stolen from her were sincere but never quite effective. And then Mulder was an outsider again, a sad smile and leftover turkey sandwich Maggie’s attempt to apologise for shutting him out, for closing ranks with her sons to stand by her only living daughter.

Mulder didn’t blame her. He couldn’t, not when Maggie had given him his only happy Thanksgivings, but he couldn’t sit at home and imagine them together either. And so he slipped back into old habits, walking into the all but deserted Hoover building and spending his Thursday lost in his files.

This year was no different. Scully, when she’d finally shown up Thursday, full of very reasonable excuses for her absence, had told him she’d be flying out to Germany for the holiday. Her face had been completely smooth, her voice low and calm, as she’d expressed her desire to see Bill, Tara and Matthew, to escape the memories of years of Virginia Thanksgivings and so Mulder had not questioned it. She’d emailed him her itinerary, a flash of that old, super-organised Scully who didn’t trust him not to call at every inappropriate morning when left unattended. She’d even cracked a smile when he’d joked about it. 

After weeks of pulling back, she’d seemed happier and more present those last few days, putting in two days on their latest case before wishing Mulder a wistful goodbye from the basement doorway on Tuesday evening. For a second he wanted to ask her not to go, to beg her to stay with him. They could see out the holidays on her mother’s couch, staring at the fire so they wouldn’t see the empty chair off to the left where Maggie ought to have been sitting. But even as he drew in the air to verbalise his need, he saw a flicker of something on her face. Pain. A pain that he hadn’t seen since those first days on the run where she’d shut him out of grimy motel bathrooms and washed the tears down the drain with her shampoo. He couldn’t do it to her. Scully needed this, she needed what was left of her family, and he would not let his selfishness make her doubt that going to Germany was the right thing to do.

She texted him from the airport on Wednesday morning, wishing him a happy holiday, as if he knew what that meant without her, and he had sat in the office and watched the live arrivals board for Frankfurt airport just to be sure her plane had landed before he let the work consume him. He told himself that was enough.

That text seems an age ago now, and it strikes Mulder as incredibly pathetic that the only texts he ever receives these days are from Scully and the doorman he pays to keep tabs on her safe passage through life when she’s too busy to remember how much he worries. There is nobody else who will contact him this weekend, no Gunmen, no friends, there’s no reason to pop up to the lobby at sporadic intervals for the signal that the basement’s damp walls so effectively blocks. Sighing, Mulder starts on his huge stack of expense claims. Not even bureaucracy can make this holiday more depressing.

The hours drag, one receipt blurring into another against the background sound of the football until something bright red is shaken loose from a pile of stationary invoices.

An envelope, the looping handwriting familiar but not immediately recognisable, until Mulder slips the heavy paper out and smooths it on the desk. It’s the same Santa Claus whack-job, the same strangely familiar tone as the one he’d dug out of his untouched case drawer and speedily added to the recycling bin. How has it ended up here, mixed so thoroughly in with unrelated items? Why is it dated November 24th? Mulder turns the envelope over, tears it open and looks inside for a postmark, for some sign of a prank, some way to explain how a note from an old non-starter has found its way onto his desk. There’s nothing and so, unsure what to think, Mulder turns his attention to the note’s contents.

> _Dear Fox,_
> 
> _I know you received my last letter and I know you think this is some sort of prank or trick but I can assure you it is not. The help I asked you for before is more desperately needed than it was even a week ago._
> 
> _I’m asking you to have just a little faith, you’ve believed in stranger things than Santa Claus after all (evil cats?!), and to go to the address below. The proof of my good intentions is there and maybe a little evidence will help you to believe that I am contacting you for want of any other choice and not to play any sort of game._
> 
> _S.C._

Beneath the signature is an address out in Annandale and Mulder’s first thought is that with holiday traffic it could take him an hour to get there. His second thought is that is is ridiculous for him, a man in his 50s, to instinctively trust a note claiming to be from Santa Claus enough that he would consider driving across town on Thanksgiving just to check out an address. Scully would do the eyebrow at him for even suggesting that there’s some truth or merit to the letter. It’s either a prank, a very strange coincidence or the machinations of a deluded informant and that’s all there is to it.

Gone are the years when Mulder would believe in anything just for the hell of it. Scully’s scepticism, years of being lied to and the weariness of age have stripped his capacity for belief back to almost nothing and the rush of authenticity he felt when reading the letter probably had more to do with a caffeine slump than any mythical figure.

Pulling on his coat Mulder heads out to find coffee and some sort of lunch. The air is warm for November and the streets are quiet. Mulder is thankful for that much at least. Perhaps the forces of the universe have had some consideration for him on this lonesome holiday after all.

The shrill peal of his phone shatters his thankful silence and as he checks the caller ID, Mulder changes his mind about the universe. It still has it in for him. It’s only the slim chance that Scully may be using her brother’s line that makes Mulder take Bill Scully Jr’s call at all.

‘Hello Bill.’ Mulder thinks he’s managed neutral rather than bitter but it turn out to be irrelevant.

‘About time you answered your damn phone you sonofabitch’. Bill’s bluster is blurry round the edges and he sounds… drunk? This day just keeps getting more and more dismal.

‘What can I do for you Bill? Sounds like it’s been quite a party over there.’

At this Bill guffaws without humour.

‘Oh you have done plenty haven’t you? It wasn’t enough to ruin Dana’s life once, you just have to keep on doing it. Keeping her from her family, her only living family on the holidays? Making her take care of you and your pathetic excuse for a department when she should be here with the rest of us. She lost her mother this year for God’s sake. You selfish ass-’

‘Bill wait!’ Mulder cuts off the drunken ramble as his heart drops into his stomach. ‘Scu- Dana… she’s not in Germany?’

‘Are you kidding me Mulder. She told Charlie and I she couldn’t get the time off. That she’d call but I bet you didn’t even give her time to do that did you?’ Did you? Why next time I see you I’m gonna show you exact-’

The end of Bill Scully’s threat bounces back off a dial tone as Mulder hangs up and hits speed dial for Scully’s apartment. It rings and rings until he reaches his car and her mobile cuts straight to voicemail.

Mulder makes it to Georgetown in fifteen minutes, swerving through traffic as the blood pounds in his ears. It’s a different building, a different time but the dread is familiar. He felt it when he rushed to her on the Tooms case, with Padgett, when Donnie Pfaster had escaped, but this time the threat is no monster. He had thought Scully needed space and time to grieve but now, with every minute, Mulder fears he has left her too long alone with the voices that haunt every person’s darkest moments.

He pulls up at 2.12 pm. The drapes in her apartment are closed.


	3. Key

_November 24th, 2:14pm_

Scully doesn’t answer. 

Not even when Mulder’s knocking ceases to be an act of man and takes on the devastating volume and endless, ominous roar of overhead thunder. He knocks until he feels the skin split on his knuckles, until he hears the chain sliding free on the next door down the corridor and then he breaks a promise he made to Maggie Scully for the first time. She had blushed a little when she’d handed him the key copied from Scully’s spare, knowing that her daughter would be furious but also knowing that sometimes Mulder’s instincts had saved her life. Maggie had made him promise not to reveal her small betrayal, holding her hand over the key in his until he’d met her eyes and given his word that he would only use it in dire circumstances. Life or death she had said, trusting him with the key to her beloved child and putting her faith in his judgement.

As the door swings open Mulder imagines how Maggie would look if she realised how badly he might have failed her; that the day on which he uses the key might also be the day he is too late to save Scully.

The air inside the apartment is cold and unscented. Mulder shivers. Scully had a habit of making even a one-night motel room smell like her shampoo and body lotion, so this cool, sterile space feels very, very wrong. He realises, as he blindly forces one foot in front of the other, that he is staring at the floor, dreading the sight of a blue-white arm draped stiffly on a couch back, a too still body in the bed or a vivid pool of thickening red creeping from the bathtub. Even as he fights it, Mulder’s mind imposes Scully’s face, the laugh lines he has counted and kissed so often he could draw them from memory, onto every crime scene he has witnessed. The macabre trip down memory lane is so visceral that he has to bite back bile and force his eyes up to survey the apartment. 

She is not here.

There is no trace of her here. Not her shoes or her handbag by the door, no kettle on the stove and none of her favourite furniture. It could be a room from a catalogue: there are no photographs, no medical journals, the shelves hold neither her books or the CDs she had insisted on keeping even after she switched her walkman for an iPod. There is no blanket tossed over the back of the couch for her to pull down when her feet invariably get cold with Mulder not there to rub them. The walls are white and undecorated, devoid of the bold harvest colours she had loved to strew about for thanksgiving, the few Christmas ornaments she would always sneak out early because she loved the sound of the chimes on the spinning angel candle holders. There is no warmth, no joy… no Scully in this room at all.

For a moment Mulder wonders if he’s somehow in the wrong flat but then he finds her toiletry bag in the bathroom. There is the same face wash and toner she has used for years, jars with her name are tucked in the cabinet and half-used bottles of her shampoo and conditioner lie in the shower, though there is no trace of their smell from recent use. The bedroom is pristine, the bed unslept in, neat rows of dry-cleaners bags hang uniform in the wardrobe with a smaller than usual parade of shoes beneath. Mulder finds the rest of her belongings in the spare room, still in boxes though she has been living here for almost two years.

Mulder returns to the living room fighting a growing sense of unease. He should be feeling relief. Of all the scenarios he had imagined driving over here, all the reasons why Scully might have lied to both him and her brothers about her plans for the holiday, the hospital double-shift he finds pencilled into the calendar on her fridge is by far the least concerning. And yet Mulder can’t escape the feeling that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

He opens Scully’s fridge and finds only milk, an out of date yoghurt and coffee grounds. Her freezer has wholemeal bread and ice. The cupboards are full of clean dishes but lacking all the store cupboard essentials that she’d insisted every pantry needed. The sink contains three unwashed mugs with coffee rings curling at the bottom and the bin is almost full of nothing but coffee filters, a torn pair of pantyhose and a bag of oranges beginning to fur. Scully is not eating. Mulder had suspected she wasn’t eating much from the deepening hollows beneath her eyes, but grief and stress had always stopped her appetite. It had never gone this far before though, she’s never let it, forcing down a salad or a cup of tea at semi-regular intervals even during chemo when the whole thing would reappear like clockwork a half hour later. She has never not eaten like this; losing even the intention of preparing anything beyond her morning coffee in her own kitchen.

How could Mulder have missed it? How could he have let it go so far? Mulder had rushed over here in a whirl of panic, imagining the intolerability of his life without Scully’s presence, he had rushed here to save her for himself, for her mother but somehow failed to see that she has been disappearing, lost even to herself for weeks now. What if Bill Mulder had not called? What if Mulder had not left the basement and found a cell signal? How long would it have taken him to see that Scully was dissolving to nothing behind her endless chorus of “I’m fine”. Mulder hates himself in that moment for not fighting harder to help her, for confusing the distance of their separation with the distance of a woman whose world is slipping unchecked through fingers numb with grief.

Footsteps in the hall outside prevent him from falling further into the familiar habit of self-loathing and blame and reminds him that he should not be here, that his presence here uninvited will not be welcome, will not help him to help Scully. The steps seem to slow outside the apartment but then pass and Mulder straightens the few things he has touched and prepares to leave, touching the key pressed back into his pocket like a good-luck charm. He promises himself and Maggie that the next time he is in this room it will be at Scully’s invitation, that he will find a way to bring her back to herself, to help her live inside her own life again.

When he reaches the door he spins and rushes back to the bedroom on a wave of regret. Mulder is not sure what makes him press a kiss to his fingers and then to her pillow. He knows it’s stupid, that there is no way Scully will feel his love or his intentions through an inanimate proxy, but he can’t help himself. If she’s not eating the chances are she’s not sleeping either, the mount of coffee evidence would suggest as much, and leaving a kiss on her pillow is as close as Mulder can get to holding her through those insomniac nights. It’s stupid. He knows it is stupid, but somehow afterwards it makes it easier to leave.

He locks her door behind him and presses his forehead to the wood in something between prayer and a plea to the universe and then steps back onto something that crunches underfoot.

A red envelope. Black writing.

Impossible.

The note is short.

> _Fox, thank you for coming._
> 
> _I knew that giving you Dana’s address directly would arouse your suspicions that I meant her harm so I can only apologise for my method of bringing you here. I need you. She needs you._
> 
> _So much has been lost already and we have so little time to make it right. I believe we can do it though. Together we may have a chance at making things right._
> 
> _S.C_

Mulder’s heart races in his chest. Whoever is sending these letters has just crossed a line and he lets himself back into Scully’s apartment long enough to seal the note and envelope in a ziploc bag from her kitchen. According to her schedule he has enough time to drop the note at the labs for fingerprinting and make it to Our Lady of Sorrows before Scully’s shift ends.

Mulder’s hopelessness has been tempered by the arrival of the note, the transformation of a bizarre prank into a legitimate threat. Weird, manipulative correspondence he can handle; the structure of an investigation is as familiar to him as having to the the strong one in his and Scully’s relationship is alien. He pulls onto the freeway with a newfound sense of purpose, maybe on the drive he’ll even come up with some sort of plan to reach out to Scully without pushing her further away.


	4. Home

The skeleton staff in the evidence lab smell strongly of eggnogg when Mulder rushes in. It takes him twice as long as normal to explain to them what he needs, to authorise the necessary paperwork, and that delay costs him a crucial ten minutes. By the time he reaches the parking lot at Our Lady of Sorrows, there is no sign of Scully’s car, her departure confirmed by the sister in charge of the pediatric wing when he rushes in to be sure. Mulder sags a little against the desk and as he does he catches sight of her familiar handwriting, looping easily across a patient chart, anchoring her to this place, to this world, reminding him that though she may be lost in the greater sense, Scully is still real, still within reach. A few minutes ago she signed that sheet, stood at this desk rotating one ankle at a time after ten hours on her feet. Scully had breathed this hospital air, and that realisation is enough to banish the ghostly version of her that has been chasing Mulder since Bill’s call. **  
**

There is still much to fear and more to do but the knot of worry in Mulder’s chest loosens enough that he leaves the hospital at a brisk walk instead of a desperate run.

The beltway traffic provides more space, time in which Mulder realises that arriving at Scully’s work and demanding she eat a sandwich in front of him would likely only have pushed her further away. Helping Scully is about as easy as cutting down brambles, rush in unprepared and you are more likely to end up with a fistful of thorns than recover what once flourished underneath.

He’s come up with half a plan when he arrives outside her apartment for a second time. He can use an almost truth, tell her Bill called, let her deception slide and offer to take her for dinner, no blame, no explanations just time, company and maybe a step towards healing.

But her car is not parked outside and the doorman shakes his head when Mulder approaches.

The knot begins to tighten again as he belts up fast enough for the nylon to burn his neck and heads to the only other place he can imagine her going.

* * *

 

The grass in Maggie Scully’s front yard is a little long and the windows are dark. In a row of jewel bright houses, all lit with festivity, strewn with twinkle lights and decorated for the holidays it looks coffin quiet. Scully’s car is on the drive.

Mulder walks up the path turning over words in his mind, shaping sentences that he discards with every exhale. He’s empty handed, he has no excuse for being here beyond the love he still carries for her, the love he had for her mother that has coagulated into a painful clot somewhere north of his heart. For all his good intentions about looking after Scully, feeding her, helping her and supporting her, he has arrived at the moment of truth with nothing but love and fear. Scully will need more than his love and she deserves better than to have to withstand his fear of losing her.

He doesn’t knock in the end. Mulder simply steps sideways on the porch until he can see into the living room, into the space empty of all the joys of the season that Maggie had so loved, and he sees Scully there.

She’s the one thing left alive in a roomful of ghosts. The fireplace is ashy and quiet, the mantelpiece dust decorated and the fading light has pulled the warmth from the floorboards, from the friendly throws that cover the furniture. In the greyness Scully’s hair is foxfire on the big couch where he’d held her hand and withstood Bill’s grimaces so many times. She’s curled in a ball, still in scrubs, sock feet tucked neatly under her bottom as though shrinking herself will reduce her loneliness. She is still, the slow rise and fall of her shoulders indicating sleep if not peace of mind.

Mulder goes to leave. Sleep is the first thing Scully loses when demons come calling and for now it is better medicine than he can offer. As he reaches the road, the raised flag of the mailbox, neat lettering still proudly announcing that this is a Scully residence, catches his eye. He knows Maggie’s mail is all being forwarded. It must be junk, on thing that Mulder can stop Scully having to deal with and so he opens the box. Mulder is too exhausted to be surprised by the inescapable red of the envelope.

Only two words precede the now familiar sign off.

> _Don’t leave._
> 
> _S.C_

And so he doesn’t. Whatever the writer of these letters wants, there is no way that Mulder is leaving Scully alone with them potentially nearby. Mulder rounds the house and digs through the shed looking for the back door key that lives under a flowerpot. Letting himself in before he can rethink he stands in Maggie’s kitchen for the first time since the wake. Her herbs have died on the windowsill; one more of her beloved things that Mulder couldn’t prevent from disaster.

The other doesn’t stir when Mulder enters the living room, nor when he drapes a blanket over her sleeping form. Scully’s cheekbones cast a sharp shadow in the half-light and Mulder misses the fullness that joy had always brought to her face. Their early partnership, her pregnancy, the first years in the unremarkable house had all been times of plump cheeks and eye crinkling smiles. At those times Mulder could believe her immortal but now, in sorrow, the lines of her humanity are all too clear under the paper white of her skin.

Unable to think of what else to do, unwilling to wake her, Mulder sits down in the chair across from Maggie’s. Ahab’s chair. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, doesn’t remember dreaming. He doesn’t remember anything until waking up to find Scully’s weight in his lap, her arms around his neck and her tears, hot and silent, soaking into his shirt. He remembers rocking her back to sleep. Rocking them both back into some sort of combined oblivion and then he remembers stirring in the grey light of dawn, stiff-necked and alone


	5. Water's Edge

It takes Mulder several minutes to shake the stiffness of the night from his body, every creak and crack reminding him of the years stretching out between him and the wrong side of fifty. His back carries the curve of the seat as he locks the back door and walks round to his car, his ribs too will feel the strain of Scully’s sleeping weight for hours, maybe even days to come. What hurts more is realising that his body is now used to sleeping without her, that alone has become his default setting, and that the way things stand he may never be able to change it back. **  
**

It starts to drizzle, damp creeping into the dry patch where Scully’s car had sheltered the driveway from overnight showers. As Mulder hurries past his thoughts are greyer than the morning. He wonders how other people manage the endless cycle of good intentions and helplessness that have defined his life these past few months. He wonders why they don’t teach you that in Psychology 101. He wonders how in the hell faux-Santa has managed to deliver yet another note without him noticing.

The envelope is softening where it’s stuck in the seal of the driver’s window, indicating it may have been there overnight, but the paper inside is completely dry.

> _You stayed, thank you._

It begins and Mulder shivers as he realises he never locked the back door behind him when he arrived the night before, that Scully and he were asleep and vulnerable while this creepy correspondent had looked on. He fishes out his phone to call the lab and finds it’s out of charge, curses and reads on, ducking into the car with the intention of heading in and picking up his answers the old fashioned way.

> _I didn’t come in. I’m sure you’re worried about that right now and you don’t need to be. I wasn’t even here in any sort of physical sense, if that helps…_

The letter feels pretty physical an intrusion to Mulder.

> _Remember the year after the cabin? What happened after you left here? What was said?_
> 
> _Some parts of the past will help you to heal. Find them. Use them. Make better choices this time round._
> 
> _S.C._

Great, Mulder thinks.

A riddle and a life lesson from a stalker who reckons he’s Santa Claus and apparently knows things that nobody but Scully should know. They’d never talked about the cabin after they left, it was just one more normal thing they couldn’t pull off and the next year hadn’t been any better, one small disappointment following another as they’d drifted further from home and from each other. There is nothing there to be salvaged. Santa might be a well-informed stalker but it seems there are some gaping holes in his omniscience when it comes to the forced pilgrimage of Mulder and Scully.

As he starts the engine, Mulder glances back up at Maggie’s house through the fine mist of rain and is hit with a sudden wave of remembrance. It’s early morning, a grey dawn between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the exhaust of their knackered Ford is dissolving on the wet street, three doors down from their untouchable, dream destination.

Mulder hadn’t told Scully where he was going and she hadn’t asked. She hadn’t responded when they’d entered Virginia, hadn’t flinched when they’d arrived in Maggie’s neighbourhood. When they were parked, he couldn’t quite make himself look at her; couldn’t face the possible anger at the risk taken or the potential tragedy of being this close but still so far away. He hadn’t thought it through. Mulder had been about to apologise, to add this terrible gift to the long list of things he shouldn’t have tried to give Scully, when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flicker of movement, a flash of bleached blonde hair and the door flying open. Mulder was out just as quickly, ready to pull Scully back, to remind her that evem being within view of her mother’s home as fugitives was insane, that there was no way they could go closer, when 5’2 of raw energy crushed past him and into the drivers seat.

‘Get in Mulder. Now.’ Her voice was as harsh as the screech of the tyres on the wet road, tearing them away from this glimpse of home and off to another unknown. Scully had driven like a woman possessed, skating corners with a confidence that both thrilled and frightened Mulder. She was so alive, the most vital she had been in weeks but also the most dangerous. He wondered if maybe she was going to drive them off a cliff or into a forest; there was a finality to the set of her jaw, a deliberateness with which she checked the rearview and raced the rain.

But their destination had not been a muddy ditch or the ocean floor. It was a diner. Nondescript on the edge of the water, its sign flashing brightly against the angry surge of the sea.

Its’ booths were high sided and vinyl and the waitress was distracted. Scully had ordered for both of them, without looking at the menu. Crab cakes. She didn’t speak until they’d finished eating; the fresh, hot food burning something close to a wholesome energy through the vacuum of fear and silence Mulder had been carrying.

‘My father would bring me here when we fought.’ Scully’s voice was low and choppy, her eyes the same colour as the sea outside. ‘He used to say that trapping me between him and the water’s edge was the only way he could stop me from running away. He was probably right. There were days I considered swimming just to get out of those conversations.’ She wore a sad smile for that memory.

‘It’s not a good day for swimming Scully,’ Mulder had offered, half joking, half worried that she might be considering  jumping over the edge; literally or figuratively, and leaving him behind.

‘I know.’ She had taken his hand over the table. ‘But it’s not a good day for running either. I’m tired. I can’t do it anymore.’ And he had squeezed her fingers to let her know that he understood, even if he didn’t know how to fix it.

It had taken many more months to find a way for her to stop. There had been many more moments where they’d reached an edge and one of them had had to find strength they didn’t know existed to keep them hanging on. It had taken years for them both to find a safe haven, but that day had been a blessing, a conversation that needed to be had, a calm in the storm of their existence. It had been about a year after that log cabin Thanksgiving.

* * *

When Mulder knocks on Scully’s door an hour later he doesn’t answer when she asks him flatly why he is there. He doesn’t argue when she tells him that her crawling into his arms to cry doesn’t necessarily mean anything. He doesn’t flinch when she tries to provoke him into one of their old coping mechanisms, resisting first the angry crush of her lips on his and then the sharp words and time-tested cruelties with which she deflects the pain of his unexpected rejection. When Hurricane Scully finally blows herself out, demanding he leave in tearful, tired fragments of sentences he fetches her coat and stands while she puts it on. He takes her hand, and leads her childlike to the car. There are no words yet, just the whirr of wheels on tarmac, the wiper blades screeching symmetrically and the dry huff of the A/C as Mulder follows the route he mapped out that morning.

The diner looks the same as it did that day all those years ago. The sea is still the grey of a fading bruise, the sign is still too bright and the waitress is still distracted. The crab cakes are still delicious and Scully eats two. One more than Mulder had hoped for.

It’s his turn to speak first and the words are heavy on his tongue, her hand cold in his when he grabs it for an anchor.

‘You can’t outrun this one Scully.’

And she nods. Once.

It’s a start.


	6. Talk

Mulder’s hopes cool with his coffee on Monday morning as the hands of the clock inch past nine, then ten o’clock and Scully does not arrive. He’d dropped her home with a gentle squeeze of her hand and a long look, one that promised help on his side and the acceptance of that help on hers.

He’d given her space then, a Sunday spent pretending not to be thinking about what she might be doing and calling his therapist for a recommendation. Somehow Mulder knows instinctively that they should not see the same person, if he can even find a way to open the conversation. He knows Maggie never got further than getting her daughter to speak to their priest and that the FBI shrink is not the right woman for this job, but this is not a conversation he can have with Scully and the maelstrom of their lives has tossed all other friends beyond reach. Mulder fingers the appointment card in his pocket and reconsiders again. Maybe he can…

No.

They’ve tried it before, on the run, healing each other. They’d stayed so close, clung so tight that they’d each become part of the others wound. It had made them toxic, the apparently healed scar rending itself open when one of them stumbled and revealing a lingering sickness beneath. Scully has to do this for herself. By herself. She was a motivating factor in Mulder’s sobriety but she had not been the stopper on the bottle. He no longer needs Scully to be infallible for his own sanity and survival. And she needs to do the same. Mulder had hoped Dr. Renton, Tuesday, 8.30 am might be the first step, but as each minute passes and Scully’s chair remains empty his hope fades.

A skin has formed on his coffee when the door opens. 11:13. Scully is late but composed, the bags under her eyes a little lighter perhaps and she meets his gaze as if it were 1993 and 8.30am. She almost smiles. Mulder starts,

‘You’re-’  

‘Late.’ She agrees. ‘I meant to text you but… this morning was…’ She pauses, clenches her jaw and drops her shoulders. ‘I saw the therapist. I don’t know how I feel about it and I don’t want to talk about it. Can we talk about… anything else?’ Admitting her humanity has always been Scully’s pet peeve and Mulder knows how much that sentence as cost her so he btes back his smile as he crumples the appointment card in his hand. She always was two steps ahead of him.

‘How about a donut and a old old-fashioned cattle mutilation Scully?’

She rolls her eyes but she takes the donut.

* * *

The next two weeks are like Scully by numbers. She creeps back into his days; three days in the office, one breakfast, two lunches and dinner, one ‘Mulder it’s me’, one late night call where she says nothing and another where she yells at him for leaving her, for taking her with him, for leaving her again and then for coming back. She’s late to the office by two hours and between eight and thirteen minutes every Monday and Thursdays but she still doesn’t want to talk about it. They close a case. It’s a vaccination scam, not exsanguination. There are no more letters and the lab results come back with nothing. He stops worrying about Santa Claus, stops looking for red envelopes, Scully is creeping back out of the darkness and he is focused on waiting to be who she needs him to be..

On Saturday 10th December, Mulder’s door goes at 6am and she’s waiting with the engine running. Scully’s eyes are red and she’s wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that used to be his, He knows when she drives back to the diner that there are things they need to say but he doesn’t expect her to thank him for making that first therapy appointment.

‘I want to hate Dr Renton, Mulder, I can’t even intimidate, You chose well. I thought I could do it on my own and I can’t. Thank you, for setting it up.’

Mulder doesn’t know how to tell her that he didn’t make the appointment and he doesn’t want to stop Scully talking to work out why she thinks that he did. When she goes to the bathroom he flicks absently through the menu and the note slides into his lap, there is no envelope this hand and the writing is sloppy as if it were written in a rush.

> _Small steps, Fox, but in the right direction._
> 
> _She’s talking, I worried it would take longer, that it might be impossible. Dr Renton is worth every penny, but it’s your turn now. There are things that need to be made clear between you, things you are both hiding. Follow her lead, be gentle, to her and to yourself. Time can only heal the wound you acknowledge._
> 
> _S.C._

‘What do you have there?’ Scully’s voice jolts Mulder as he casts wildly about the room looking for somebody who could have slid the letter into the menu since they’ve sat down. There is nobody. The waitress moves at a glacial pace and the only other customer at 7am on a weekend is a trucker who is asleep in a booth and hasn’t moved since they arrived.

Mulder shoves the note into his pocket and tries to act naturally. Scully isn’t buying.

‘It’s nothing. A possible lead on a case.’ He picks the explanation she is least likely to want to explore on a weekend morning and is rewarded with an indulgent sigh.

‘Some things never change Mulder. I only asked because I thought for a moment… no. Never mind.’ Scully lets it drop and he takes the pass, unwilling to burden hr with this strangeness when her progress is so new. Silence settles comfortably and their coffee is done, Mulder assumes their morning is drawing to a close but then Scully signals for a refill.

She adds cream methodically, watching as the whorls of milk stretch and are consumed by the darkness.

‘She was the only one who would talk about him you know?’ And Mulder hears her suppressed tears, feels them in his own throat. ‘My mom. She would talk about William. About how he used to smile and grab my hair, about the time he peed on me just before we were going to leave for church. She brought me cake on his birthday. Even the years when I wouldn’t let her in to share it, she would leave it at my door. She never let me forget that I was his mother, she never forgot he was her grandson. I think that’s what she meant to tell you on that last day. That he was your son, and that even though it hurt - god it hurts so much - you will always be his father. I don’t think I ever said that to you before, not in those exact words. I should have. I should have told you the day you came back, before he was born. And when you held him. I should have screamed it in your face when we fought over everything that wasn’t him on the road. I should have sobbed it in the dark. I should have said something. Anything.

I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you before. I’m sorry that I couldn’t give you that, that I couldn’t let you have that part of me. I think I thought that if I refused to see you as a father, if I never let you acknowledge that I was a mother, then somehow we could be the people we were before. But we can’t. I miss him Mulder. Every day. Some days in so huge a way that it’s all I can do not to let it swallow him and other times just in passing, like a cloud shadow on a sunny day. I need to be able to share that with somebody. With you. Can you bear it? Can you talk about it.’

Mulder shakes his head. Then nods. Then shrugs. His voice comes out as a hoarse whisper.

‘I don’t remember him. The weight of him, I can recall, and his smell. And I remember how you looked when I first saw you with him, like a stained glass window lit from behind with this little bundle. But I can’t remember how he looked exactly. I have one picture, but I don’t remember for myself. I hate that.’ He pauses and meets Scully’s eyes for the first time since she started speaking.

Her blue is calmer than he expected, sorrowful but still. Mulder doesn’t remember when she took his hand. He breathes in, drawing strength from that connection. He’s supposed to be the strong one right now but it takes every ounce of his composure to hold her gaze when he speaks again.

‘Will you tell me about him. Tell me everything?’

Scully nods, and a tear slips free and rushes for her chin, unchecked.

‘Come with me and I’ll show you.’


	7. Solstice

Scully comes to him on the longest night of the year. If the look on her face didn’t tell him not to ask questions, just to be, then her outfit would. Dana Scully does not leave her home after 10pm and drive to the middle of nowhere, to a place she has no need to go back to, with pajama pants tucked into socks inside boots and her coat buttoned up wrong unless the world is ending. Her face is crumpled in the porchlight; she’s been sailing into the wind for too long and in the seemingly endless hours between dusk and dawn the ropes have snapped and it’s all fallen down. She’s drifting, empty, and without words she tells him he is the closest thing she has to a safe haven.

They haven’t broached any difficult subjects since the day where she talked him through the first few pages of an album of baby pictures, smiling over the stories that accompany the pictures of the marvellous stranger that is his son. Mulder was still marvelling at seeing Scully’s eyes so clearly in William’s face, even at four months, when had she slammed the album shut, and told him firmly but not unkindly to go, that she couldn’t go any further that day. He cried in the hallway from the bittersweetness of it, and waited for her to bring it up again. 

She hasn’t.

Mulder follows her upstairs in the silence and watches her climb into bed, fully clothed, boots and all and bury herself in his scent. He follows her, as always, but is careful not to touch her, careful not to intrude or insert himself into whatever this is. He will be there, on the edge of the bed, to the ends of the earth, but he will not fall back into old habits. Scully’s breathing slows and her eyes stay closed. She doesn’t reach for him and so Mulder just watches, tracing her outline with his eyes through the darkness and the sheets and all of her clothes. He knows her by heart. Three weeks of sporadic meal sharing has replaced the first few of Scully’s missing pounds and Mulder can imagine the peaks and troughs of her skin, gracing her bones in clinging planes. just a little loose still in places. He wonders if the fact that his body is not responding with arousal to her presence in his bed, his imaginings of her naked, says more about his age or their circumstances. He decides it doesn’t matter. They have been so very far apart and know, he feels closer to Scully than he has in years; perhaps not physically, perhaps not even in terms of his involvement in her life, but in terms of honesty and openness and the kinds of things that make life worth living.

As if reading his mind Scully’s lashes flutter and she’s awake, sleep softening the spaces between her words.

‘Who am I Mulder?’

‘You’re Scully, Scully,’ Mulder tells her. She gives him an eyebrow, squashed a little by the pillow and he shrugs just as ineffectively. Though he could spend an eternity listing all the things she is, it’s not what he thinks that matters at the moment. Scully pulls the pillow round between them and cradles it to her body, tucking her chin over and regards him seriously. Sadly.

‘I can’t have children Mulder.’ He doesn’t know what to tell her. This is not new information but the cocktail of failures and tragedies that led to that statement being true will never not be devastating. Mulder is still searching for a new way to heal this old wound when Scully speaks again.

‘I thought I had made my peace with it before William. And then again recently. My work at the hospital helped, I was saving children’s lives and I felt like in a very small way I had contributed to the ongoing lives of each of my patients. I really did think I had learned to live with never being a mother. Until six months ago my doctor told me I was going through menopause, and in that moment I realised that somewhere in the very back of my mind I’d been thinking perhaps we’d get a second shot at a miracle. That perhaps you’d come back to me healed and we would get another chance. But that even that tiny chance was gone. I was furious with you for forcing me to leave you. I was angrier with myself for letting what, even then, I believed was a temporary separation, separate us for those last few years when it was only almost impossible. Logically I could argue that nothing had changed, that William was our miracle, that I was his mother for a few sweet months, and that those happy days with him would have to be enough. My mom helped with that but somehow I couldn’t reason away my emotions. I was grieving all over again for a version of me who never was.

And then the X-Files came back. You came back. And I clung to them. Maybe I wouldn’t be a mother but I’d always like being Agent Scully. I’d always liked myself best when we were partners professionally. But that was different too. We were older, the Bureau was different and I wasn’t the same person I was in the 1990s. So I wasn’t an Agent.

And then I wasn’t a daughter anymore. My mom… she and I didn’t always agree but we were always, always, there for each other. She was my safe harbour and I was the ship that she sent her hopes out into the world on. I could never have given up completely with her behind me. But without her?

All I had left was you Mulder.’

He doesn’t need to be able to see her in the ink-black of the small hours to know that her eyes are wet with tears. He can hear her struggling for control, hear her drawing a sharp, aching line through things she had hoped to be, things she had dreamed of being and things she had taken for granted until it was too late. Mulder wants nothing more than to reach across the space between them and hold Scully, define her borders with his arms until she can do it on her own, but he waits.

‘I couldn’t just be yours.’ Scully’s voice is quieter now, blanket soft as she draws out the last lines of her nighttime confession. ‘You left me before Mulder. You vanished into your head and closed the gates behind you. After the memorial I wanted nothing more than to run to you, to come home and pull together a life out of all the broken pieces we have left but in the back of my mind I knew that you could leave me again, that you would survive, but that I wouldn’t.

Alone, I’m… I don’t know. I’m not a mother and I’m not a daughter. I’m not fully an agent or a doctor. And I can’t be yours Mulder. What does that leave me? Who am I?’

And then she closes the gap, her fingers impossibly cool in his despite the blankets and the heat and Mulder doesn’t think when he tells her the truth he knows so clearly, and thought she did too.

‘You were never mine Scully. You shared yourself with me, sometimes more of yourself than others, but you are who you always have been. You’re a thousand different, wonderful, tricky, difficult little things but also just one. You. I could never possess you. Nobody could. You don’t have to be mine to have me, just like you don’t stop being Maggie’s daughter or William’s mom just because they’re gone. You’re reducing yourself to descriptions that would never have been adequate to describe you. So I’m going to tell you what I tell my therapist every week, “Reducing Scully to a trigger/cause/stereotype/symptom is underestimating her, and will not help us fix anything.”’

A croaky, wet-sounding laugh drifts from her side of the bed.

‘You talk about me in therapy Mulder?’

He laughs. ‘More than you’d probably want to know. I’m a very obsessive man, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ Scully squeezes his hand.

‘I talk about you too. More than I’d like. Maybe I’m more obsessive that I like to admit.’ She’s reflective now, and her grip on his fingers loosens but doesn’t release.

‘There you go Scully. Number one for the list of things that you are. Obsessive.’ Mulder wonders if she rolls her eyes at that, but doesn’t expect what comes next, a steady shuffle of clothes and bedclothes until the top of her head is resting under his chin and her hands resting loosely against his chest.

‘Number two can be warm,’ is the last thing she mumbles before sleep claims her, her breaths slowing to a peaceful rhythm that whiles away the hours until dawn.

Mulder slips out of bed when the sun rises to go running, loathe to leave the space Scully has made for him at her side but chased out of the house by the busyness of his thoughts. He runs until things become simple, until he is resolved to ask if maybe they can see a therapist together, if they can try and work out a way of being both themselves and “them”.

He runs right over the red envelope on the doormat. Picking it up with only half his mind set on the words within.

> _Christmas Eve._
> 
> _11am._
> 
> _Maggie’s House._
> 
> _S.C._


	8. Box

Mulder pulls up at Maggie Scully’s house at 10:55am on Christmas Eve and looks wistfully at the empty passenger seat. While he isn’t sure exactly what is about to happen, that he won’t end up arresting some misguided Santa wannabe for trespass, he does wish he’d found a way to explain the whole thing to Scully. She’s probably safer at home, but still, it feels wrong sitting here alone when this whole thing seems to have been about her.

He had planned to tell her, to offer her a way in and not return to his old habit of running at mysteries without her, but the right moment had never presented itself. Few conversations leave space for a casual, “Hey Scully, so I’ve been getting these anonymous letters about giving you your Christmas wish and apparently it all finishes on your mom’s lawn tomorrow!” It’s not exactly post-therapy, or pre-briefing conversation.  Then, there were more important things to consider, like that someone was murdering old folks and then hiding them in snowmen or the fact that the mother of his child had sat in a room with him and a stranger and laid bare some feelings he had thought long-lost.

_“I’m angry. With myself for giving up and with Mulder for leaving all those years ago. And with myself for still not being able to get over it. And I’m scared that I’ll never not be angry. And I’m sad that being so angry for so long has cost me so much.”_

_She hadn’t cried but he had._

_He’d cried like had the night his mom died; the guilt, the loss and the terror of loneliness rising uncontrollably from somewhere deep beneath all the healing he’d done and forcing itself free. Scully hadn’t held him like she had back then, hadn’t tried to sew him back together along the messy incisions of his grief, but she had passed him a tissue, stroked his arm and after their hour was up she had held his hand as they left._

_When they reached their separate cars she smiled one of her sad smiles,_

_‘Between us, we must be keeping D.C.’s psychiatrists in business!’_

_A joke to try and soften the separation, an old tactic practiced in endless crises, but he hadn’t been able to respond in kind._

_‘We probably should have done this a long time ago Scully.’_

_‘Mulder.’ she’d perfected the art of saying his name like a sigh. ‘There are a lot of things we should have done a long time ago.’_

* * *

 

And then she was gone, only as far as the office but far enough for him to lose his nerve, to swallow back the story of the letters and all the other things he’d been meaning to tell her. Things like that he loved her, that for him hard anger had crumbled years ago into something soft and sad, regret and guilt and self-loathing, but not blame, not anymore.

As the second hand on his watch ticks towards the hour, Mulder decides that after he is done here he will go to Scully’s apartment and tell her these things. Maybe she’ll let him see the album again. She wouldn’t need to tell him new stories, reliving the first ones would be enough for now, it was more than he ever thought he’d get. He drifts into a soft reminiscence of a picture, Scully sleeping with William draped over her chest, his little fist pressed into her cheek. Maggie had taken that one, Scully said, the day her self-sufficiency had cracked with exhaustion and she’d called her mom begging for help cleaning up, only to pass out on the sofa the second she sat down. According to Maggie, mother an baby had slept through both the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner, stirring only when nature called the smaller of their party.

The purr of an engine invades Mulder’s memories and he glances up, expecting… he’s not sure what exactly he is expecting, but it’s not Scully, pulling into the driveway across from him with a quizzical expression on her face.

He gets out of the car right as a clock down the road strikes the hour, and crosses to her.

‘So what’s with the mysterious rendezvous, Mulder?’ She is curious but not cross, and holding a familiar red envelope.

‘You’ve been getting them too?’ He asks,and her eyebrow climbs north.

‘Them? Mulder, all I got was your note asking me to meet you here today.’ She holds up the envelope and he sees his own handwriting, spidery and slanted, forming the familiar letters of her name on the crisp paper.

‘I - I didn’t send that Scully…’ he stutters and instantly regrets his words when her expression of indulgence dissolves into a guarded blankness that he knows means she is hurt and hiding it. He hadn’t written it but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want her here. 

Too late.

‘Mulder. It’s Christmas eve and I don’t have time for… I thought you... Actually just forget it! We’re not who we used to be and it was stupid of me to come. This is not a festive ghost hunt I want to be a part of.’ And before he can find the words to stop her, she’s at her car door and grappling with the handle which resists her.

‘Scully wait-’

‘NO!’ she surprises him with her volume, with the brightness of tears already spilling and the hoarseness of her rage. ‘We were supposed to be moving forward Mulder and I won’t - I can’t - For fucks sake Mulder, give me my keys and stop whatever this is!’

But he doesn’t have her keys and he didn’t lock her car and he doesn’t have any words so instead he just crosses to her and puts his hands on her shoulders as she begins to sob, batting him away, hard at first and then weakly as she crumples into the shelter of his chest.

Around her sorrow she chokes out words, questions that he has asked himself many times and never been able to answer.

‘Why are we like this Mulder? Why do we never say what we want? I’m tired of leaving trails of clues, following ambiguous hints towards what I hope is a shared destination. I want things to be simple. I want to feel safe.’

And he wants to tell her she is safe but he doesn’t know it for sure; Mulder never has been confident in his ability to shield Scully’s heart from his own chaos or her body from their enemies. Even now doesn’t know that the engine he hears behind him isn’t some stalker or psychopath with a van full of red envelopes and cruel intentions. He pulls her away from the noise and towards the house while he tries to get his bearings in the mess this morning has become.

The engine turns out to belong to the mail man, whistling his way from house to house and barely sparing a glance for the spectacle that is Scully sniffling on the porch and Mulder trying to stand between her and the world. When he passes, Mulder flops down on the porch and pats the step next to him.

‘Sit down Scully and I’ll try to explain. though God knows I have no idea what’s going on.’

And with a snotty sounding cough she nods and stays. It’s more than he hoped for.

Mulder tells her about the first letter and his dismissal of it, then about thanksgiving, though he leaves out the terror that had choked him and the desperate fear that had possessed his whole body as he drove to her side. He hears the crook of her eyebrow, though he doesn’t look over, when he starts theorising about the writer’s motive and she quietly questions the more ludicrous of his ideas.

It takes less time than he expects to lay the whole thing out. In the light of day and the company of his oldest confidante it all seems much less dramatic than it felt as it happened, problems shared between them always did seem more manageable. Mulder only objects a little when Scully suggests that aside from the eeriness of the timing and the sneaky delivery of the letters, there’s not really a case. An annoyance maybe, a series of coincidences and a possible invasion of privacy, but the motive doesn’t seem to be sinister. And as for the end game... With Scully at his side in the winter sunshine, Mulder thinks maybe the letter writer has done a strange thing for the right reasons. 

It’s gone eleven, the hour has passed and they are together and talking, the low husk of Scully’s laugh is crackling through the years long silence between them like spring on a frozen lake. There have been days in the past few years, especially in the barrenness after Maggie’s death, where this eventuality has seemed as unlikely as the most ridiculous X-File. But here they are. Maybe that’s all the writer wanted. But how did they know?

It hits Mulder suddenly.

‘Scully, did you write the letters?!’ And he turns fast enough to read in her surprise that she didn’t.

‘Of course I didn’t Mulder! If I wanted you to show up somewhere, or to talk to you, I would have just called!’

It’s his turn to look disbelieving, and Scully blushes a little.

‘Okay, maybe I wouldn’t… But if I was going to ask you for help, this isn’t really my style. Why would I have invited myself in your handwriting? And surely you would have recognised my writing weeks ago?’

Mulder begins to argue that she could have got somebody to write on her behalf, but stops as soon as he starts. If Scully were desperate enough to reach out in letter form, the likelihood of her also being willing to share the depths to which she has sunk with a third party is minute. She also wouldn’t have been so hurt by his accidental rejection when she arrived. And she’s never been able to fake so much as his signature on an application form, let alone an invitation in his handwriting. So Mulder lets the theory slip into silence and they sit, waiting for a sign to move or a reason to stay.

Neither arrives, and though Mulder’s heart is warm in Scully’s presence, his ass is beginning to freeze. He levers himself upright, feeling each year in the complaint of his joints and reaches down to his partner.

‘C’mon Scully. Let’s not waste another Christmas Eve on a wild ghost chase. Coffee. I’m buying.’

And they leave the porch same way they arrived, together, though this time there are no tears.

As they pass the end of the driveway, the small red flag of the mailbox pricks at Mulder’s consciousness and he stops.

It could be nothing, and a leisurely coffee with Scully seems like enough of a miracle after the year they’ve had. But now she’s noticed it too and before he can stop her she’s opened the flap and pulled out a red envelope.

‘Oh.’

Is all she says and Mulder reaches for it but she won’t let go. It’s the same script, the same size as all the others, but Scully’s holding this one as though the answers to every question they have ever asked are inside.

When she looks at him, her eyes are wide and a tear is caught in each corner.

‘Mulder…’ she manages, and he begins to panic, wishing she hadn’t come, that he’d kept this stupid scheme away from her during this season of vulnerability, but it’s too late and she’s biting her lip as she looks back at the envelope.

‘This is my mother’s writing.’

And as the seal is broken, things begin to fall into place. The familiar feel of the S and C in the signature, seen so often in cards and on restaurant bills. How had he not seen it before? How had he not recognised the sweet familiarity of his name in Maggie’s phrases, her concern and her straight-forwardness in the requests made. Mulder is so caught in the revelation of his own blindness, that the questions about how a dead woman is sending messages don’t start to register until Scully has already read the note and started for the house.

She scrambles in her pocket for the door key, fumbles the lock and waves her hand in Mulder’s face as he starts to ramble about the impossibility, the insanity, the idea that this could be the cruellest of pranks.

Scully takes the stairs at something close to a run, stumbling over the rug at the top and righting herself against the wall even as the other hand reaches for the attic ladder. Her ascent is reckless, deaf to Mulder’s concerns and with each rung years seem to drop from her face, poles switching as she chases a wraith-like truth and he tries to protect her with scepticism. But Scully is unstoppable, charging through dust motes that hang lazy in the midday sun and stopping only when a box is recovered and placed between them, a neat red string holding it closed and an envelope tucked underneath.

Time slows down then, breathing with it, and when Scully meets his eyes, Mulder can see doubt creeping back in to cloud the manic blue that had dragged them inside.

‘She said this was for us.’ 

There is no question in Scully’s voice, but she doesn’t reach for the string either. Mulder waits for more, caught again in the hushed moments between intention and action, the place where he and Scully had worked for so long side-by-side but never touching. He wants to touch now, to tear into the box that was intended for them, the two of them, together, but he is also afraid.

She always was the brave one.

Scully’s hands are steady as she unties the bow and opens the envelope, as steady as they were when she shook his hand all those years ago in the basement, and reached for him on the night they finally crashed together. Mulder is less steady, so he moves behind her, one hand light on the small of her back and his head ducked into the sweet air above her shoulder that he always felt was his true home. This way they can read together.

> _Dear Dana and Fox._
> 
> _I never planned to do things this way, but I also didn’t plan on leaving so suddenly. The Lord works in mysterious ways, I realise that now, more than ever. For many years I felt myself caught between those who were lost to me and those who remained. My faith let me keep Melissa and your father alive in my heart, believing I would see them again, and I hope Dana that the same will be true for you when it comes to me. I will always be with you, as are they, even when things seem impossibly dark._
> 
> _What was much harder was the separation from those still living, from Charlie when he fled from us, from you when you disappeared for all those years, and from William. I never judged you for giving him up, and though I never truly understood your reasons, I had faith in your love for him. I knew you had only done what you felt you had to._
> 
> _Which is why I must ask your forgiveness for what follows, for what I did and never told you. Over the years I watched you and Fox struggle with your grief and I waited for the right time to tell you, a time where what I had would be a blessing and not another burden. It never came or perhaps I was just never brave enough. But this is my last chance, my last letter, and my last confession._
> 
> _Know please that this began, as it ends, with my love for you, my daughter and my son, and for the child we all so briefly shared._
> 
> _Merry Christmas darling, and many happy years to come._
> 
> _Mom_

They open the box together, sat hip to hip on the settling boards of the house and unpack Maggie’s final gift.

It begins with letters, dated the second year they were on the run and addressed first to Father McCue and then to a series of Catholic adoption agencies. The tone is a mix of polite formality and heartbreak and the subject is William. Maggie appears to have petitioned various agencies to reveal the location of her grandson, with little success.

The trail gathers intensity as time passes, Maggie revealing her fears that her daughter and Mulder are dead, begging not for custodyor regular contact, but simply for reassurance that her grandson is okay. Her net widens to include Skinner at the FBI, Bill’s contacts in the government anyone who might be able to help and it all seems hopeless. Scully’s, ‘Oh , Mom,’ is laden with sorrow and just a touch of resignation at the genetic source of her tenacity, relentlessly pursuing the impossible.

But then there’s a letter in an unfamiliar hand, forwarded by an agency in Wyoming, the originating address redacted. The tone is hesitant, but stuck to the end is a small photograph of a toddler, leaning crookedly on the arm of a scruffy sofa. He has brown hair, big blue eyes and a grin that is 100% Mulder.

William.

The letter is from the boy’s adoptive mother, her update short, fear that the attempt to reach them means trouble for the boy who is now her beloved son leaching from the ends of her sentences the same way the ink spreads where Scullys tears hit the paper.

From there on there are thick folders of letters and photographs, one from each year, the tone growing conversational as it becomes clear that Maggie does not want to take the boy away. The Van der Kamps are simple, honest folks, and speak with unguarded pride about their son, photocopied report cards and classroom awards intermingling with Little League team pictures and Christmas round robins. There is a snapshot of a life in the box, a life that the two people surrounded by years of lost letters had made together and have missed.

The afternoon wears on in cycles of grief and elation: laughter at William’s terrible fourth grade poetry composition, his Halloween costumes and bad haircuts, and sadness over the few half-true tidbits Maggie was able to share when William began asking questions about his birth parents. There has never been direct contact, the same Wyoming caseworker passing on letters between the two parties each month, but the connection is there and it burns a clean hot line through the decade of unanswered questions that Mulder and Scully have been carrying like a cross.

When the light begins to fail Scully flops back onto the messy tumble of papers behind her, eyes bleary from crying but somehow lighter than she has been in months. Mulder sets aside the 8th grade essay on space exploration he’s been devouring and peels off his reading glasses, leaning back on an elbow until he can see her face in the half-light.

‘He’s okay,’ is all she says, and lays a hand on the five o'clock shadow on his cheek, connecting them over the record of their sons existence. The papers under her shift and William’s face appears, laughing over something off camera, but alive and thriving. Mulder smiles, and the act unknots something that has been choking his heart for the longest time without him really noticing.

‘He’s more than okay Scully’, he tells her, smoothing the strand of hair that always disobeys her careful styling behind her ear. ‘He’s a miracle.’

And she nods and smiles back and sobs and then pulls him down, pressing her lips to his cheekbone and his forehead as he holds her close.

When the night finds them they are still there, locked together by Maggie’s gift, still broken but now with a chance of healing. When Scully scrabbles for the light switch, Mulder makes a silly joke about it never usually being this easy to chase the darkness away and she laughs. They pack the photographs and letters back into the box but they do not tie it shut, instead passing it down the ladder and leaving it on the table as they start to build a fire in the long empty grate. He dials for takeout and she pours wine, each casting glances back to the box of memories that Maggie has left them, sated for the day but wanting to check it is still real.

When midnight strikes they are curled tightly together on the couch, lit only by firelight and in the shooting shadows Mulder asks the one thing they have not spoken of in the long hours of discovery.

‘Scully?’

She mumbles her wakefulness into his neck, her lashes kissing butterflies all along his throat.

‘How do you think she did it?’

Scully hums, and then shakes her head.

‘I don’t care Mulder, the logical explanation is… well there isn’t one. All that matters is that she did. So I’m taking this one on faith.’

The silence that follows is warm and it melts into Scully sleeping soundly against his chest. For the first time in a long time, Fox Mulder thinks he might try believing in god. Out of the corner of his eye he catches movement at the window and he sleepily turns to focus on it. She’s gone before he can clear the bleariness from his eyes, but for a split second he’s sure he sees Maggie Scully standing at the window of her house, smiling broadly, winking once and then dissolving into nothing.


End file.
